On Writing (in English)

As it turns out I’m not a very good writer. Not that my final product is impenetrable or incoherent. It’s more that my process of creation is personally painful. Write. Read. Wretch. Re-read. Sigh. Shuffle. Delete. Delete. Delete. Rewrite. Then repeat ad-nauseam. It’s not that I aspire to be Tracy Kidder, Steven Levy, Bruce Sterling or Douglas Adams. I’d just like to feel less anxious writing English prose than I do writing C++ poetry.

Back in 2005, the musician Jonathan Coulton quit his job and started on a personal project he called, “A thing a week”. His goal was to write, record and publish at least one song or interesting snippet each week. After 52 weeks he declared the project a personal success.

Following his lead, I’m going to attempt to write and publish, “Ten interesting things”. Hopefully one a week for ten weeks. A regimen designed to make some future eleventh interesting thing easier to compose than this blog post.

On the off chance anyone besides my wife reads one of my ten things, drop me a comment to keep me going.